The Science Learnification Weekly (March 6, 2011)

This is a collection of things that tickled my science education fancy in the past week or so. Some of these things may turn out to be seeds for future posts.

Screencasting in education

Last week I posted links to a couple of posts on screencasting as part of a collection of posts on flipped/inverted classrooms in higher education. Well this week I’m going to post some more on just screencasting.

I mentioned this last week, but Robert Talbert has started a series of posts on how he makes screencasts.

In the first post, he is kind enough to spell out exactly what a screencast is among other things.

It’s unofficially official that #scast is the hashtag of choice for talking about screencasting on twitter.

Added March 10:Mylene from the Shifting Phases blog talks about some of the nuts and bolts of preparing her screencasts including pointing out how the improved lesson planning helps her remember to discuss all the important little points.

I taught a 3rd-year quantum mechanics course last year and encouraged the students, using a very small bonus marks bribe, to read the text before coming to class. I think that due to the dense nature of the material, their preparation time would be much more productive and enjoyable if I created screencasts for the basic concepts and then had a chance to work on derivations, examples and synthesis in class. With the reading assignments they were forced to try to deal with basic concepts, synthesis, derivations and examples on their own which was asking quite a lot for their first contact with all those new ideas. I’m pretty interested to try out screencasting and

Arduino

I have been scheming for a while to bring the Arduino microprocessor (a.k.a. very small open-source computer) into my electronics courses starting with a 2nd year lab. Arduino is a favorite of home hobbyists and the greater make community.

Standards-based grading in higher education

I am very fond of the idea of basing a student’s grade on what they can do by the end of the course instead of penalizing them for what they can’t do along the way when they are still in the process of learning. I also love the huge potential to side-step test anxiety and cramming.

Folks using this grading scheme/philosophy (a.k.a. the SBG borg) are mostly found at the high-school level, but there are some folks in higher ed implementing it as well. I am strongly considering trying out SBG in one of my future upper-division courses, such as Quantum Mechanics, but there are some implementation issues that I want to resolve before I completely sell myself on trying it out. I am in the middle of writing a post about these issues and look forward to discussing them with those that are interested.

Special thanks go to Jason Buell from the Always Formative Blog for bringing most of these higher ed SBG folks to my attention. He has a great bunch of posts on SBG implementation that fork out from this main page.

SBG implementations in higher ed:

Andy Runquist is using collaboarative oral assessments as part of his SBG implementation. This is the only higher ed Physics implementation that I have encountered so far and I have been chatting Andy up a ton about what he is up to in his first implementation.

Adam Glesser from the GL(s,R) blog has tons of SBG posts: He is in his first year of a full SBG implementation in his Calculus courses. He gets bonus points for being a boardgame geek and playing Zelda with his 4-year old son.

Sue VanHattum talks about wading into the water as she slowly moves into SBG implementations by way of a mastery learning implementation. Search her blog for other SBG posts.

Bret Benesh comes up with a new grading system for his math courses with help from the SBG borg.

Thanks for the encouragement on documentation. I am usually good about keeping debrief notes as my courses are going, but I never sit down and do the last step of putting everything together in a way that could potentially be handed over to somebody else. So I greatly appreciate your interest, it will help make sure I get stuff done.

I have some questions for you on your SBG implementation, but I will comment on your thread since that seems like the sensible place to do it.